Two scholars on ways to reset teaching
Claudia Rozas Gómez: Auckland University has embarked on a project to reset and transform the ethos of the place. ‘Place’ is the key word, because part of the reset is about making our place in Tāmaki Makaurau fundamental to how we conduct our work as a university. The Dean has asked whether I will join our faculty’s team on this ambitious, and often ambiguous, project. I suspect the invitation to join the taskforce means there are no other hapless takers.
The taskforce meetings take place on a different campus from ours, and I am excited to see that we are meeting in the building where I completed my postgraduate studies many years ago. The Fisher Building is where I committed to a relationship with education. Like a first love, I still swoon when I walk the building’s corridors. On the first day we meet, colleagues from across the university gather in a room that is too small for the number of people present. The smallness of the space intensifies everything in the room; voices are louder, movement is more disruptive. Worse, the tiny distance between bodies is uncomfortable – a kinship we are not quite ready for. I am worried that I am unable to get into Microsoft Teams and feel generally unprepared for the day ahead. Next to me, a colleague has not only managed to get into Microsoft Teams but has also printed relevant documents and organised them in a ring-binder – with coloured dividers. It is the first day of school and I am already behind.
The university is no longer the It Girl we used to be; we are now a T-Rex and the meteor is coming for us
As the day unfolds, our quest is explained to us. There are things that are written down, official discourse, openly acknowledged and embraced. They are aspirations we wish to paint in bright colours, a certificate to be proudly displayed on our fridge. And then there are the unsaid, unofficial drivers for change. These drivers are based in a fear about relevance. The university is no longer the It Girl we used to be; we are now a T-Rex and the meteor is coming for us.
The mix of both radical project and customer satisfaction feels difficult to negotiate, the Third Way-ish tone grates on my sensibilities. But the direction is already set, and we are told to think big and be bold. There is no choice but to surrender to the ambiguity and to hold the tension as best we can. Still, this talk of place and home captures my imagination.
I email a senior colleague who is involved in the project and ask about the thinking that informed the focus on place. I smile as I write my email; it has been almost 30 years since Alison taught me in the Fisher Building. She responds and begins by noting the difficulty of thinking about the local when universities are used to thinking about themselves in terms of their international reputations. In this preliminary observation, I realise the project’s capacity to speak back to yet another centre. The centre of rankings and competition, and we’re-better-than-you-are, and why-can’t-you-be-more-like-your-sister. Alison moves on to explain the commitment to place.
I think it came out of an Indigenisation project that is going on around the whole world at the moment, and that movement is about presence, and local and contextual perspectives for lasting positive change.
The ideal is for staff to experience the university as their ‘home’, where they can learn things that will change them and change the world as well....Weighty aspirations. They seem out of reach
She tells me these sorts of ideas are not new in other countries. The challenge for us is to generate new traditions in relation to place by exploring the histories of our places, and to consider the ways in which we are part of those histories.
It is a direction rather than a destination, and the ideal is for all university members to experience the university as their ‘home’, somewhat like their own marae in which they have a stake and for which they feel enthusiasm, where they can learn things that will change them and change the world as well.
Weighty aspirations. They seem out of reach. Alison tells me that we should aim for small shifts, slowly moving towards a university that benefits everybody, including those who have been underserved in the institution and in our wider communities. Perhaps these imaginary worlds you talk about are like that, Peter. A direction rather than a destination. A place we are moving towards but never quite arrive at, an imaginary world held up against our lived one like a star chart to guide our journey.
I write letters to students to establish a dialogue. Not just between my students and me, but between them and a life in education. I want preservice teachers to know that education demands a fullness of response, an ache and a longing that never goes away. Education, in this sense, is a place of wonder and transformation.
And so here we swim, Peter, bobbing up and down in a conversation that floats from education to university life and back again. The tide pulls us out and the tide brings us back....We are in an ongoing relationship with education. That is why I tell students that teaching should be a love affair they never forget, or a puzzle they never learn to solve. Wonder is the thread that stops us from giving up or surrendering to cynicism. Wonder is the thread that allows us to make and remake education landscapes free from orthodoxy and certainty. Wonder is an ache and belief that provokes us towards imaginary worlds in which we make education good and right.
*
Peter O'Connor: I’ve been working with initial teacher education students learning how to teach senior high school drama and dance. We are looking at how to teach Billy Goats Gruff.
Billy Goats Gruff is at one level a simple children’s story about three goats and a troll who sits under the bridge. His role in the story is to scare goats so that they don’t eat all the grass on the other side. At another level, it can operate as an allegory for teaching about terrorism. It requires bravery to teach about that.
I imagine the Ukrainian and young Russian men sent to kill and die for something they were told they must do
One option in drama classes is to act out the story. That approach is to imaginative pedagogy what painting by numbers is to art. A skills-based transactional approach would see children rather meaninglessly practise the movement of goats crossing the bridge and running away from the troll.
Yet I want them to help their students to wonder, what it is like to be a troll? To hide in the dark with the job of scaring others? I want to find ways, with their imaginations warm, for them to dig playfully and meaningfully inside the story.
I ask them in small groups to imagine the landing page for an online prospectus for troll school, the place where you learn to scare.
They use their bodies to create the central image and use the idea of a GIF to make it rhythmically move. Bodies crawling, faces contorted to scare, grabbing at goats, eating them, trolls glorying in their victories over the goats. Groans of dying goats and menacing trolls send us into fits of giggles. After all, it is just imagined fun. And we sit together, happy in this crazed Omicron-surging pandemic, joyful at being together in a classroom.
We ask, "If we were able to look in troll classrooms, what might we see? Can you show us?"
We also ask about the history of great trolls, goat identification, techniques in scaring, and goat-cooking classes.
Then we place two chairs at the end of the alleyway to represent the bridge. I’ll walk down the alley to the bridge. I’ll be the troll on my first mission, ready to take my place under the bridge. As I’m creeping down the alley, I can hear the words of my parents: "Don’t be afraid, we are with you...Remember who you are and who you come from....Remember who you fight for. Never surrender...We know you will do your duty."
Building empathy for the troll is not about being sympathetic to their cause
As I step between the chairs, I pull my bag closer to my chest. My breathing is short and heavy and fills the silence. I screw my face into a grimace. I declare I am determined to do my duty, and in that moment I imagine the Ukrainian and young Russian men sent to kill and die for something they were told they must do.
We sit and talk of what we made together, how we had created an imagined world and in doing so had started to question more deeply our lived one. Instead of replaying the story, we had gone inside, under and alongside the story to end as it starts with a killer in hiding. We talked of how this might help young people wonder about who the trolls are, about who determines who gets seen as trolls and who determines who are innocent goats.
Building empathy for the troll is not about being sympathetic to their cause. It is about walking in their shoes long enough to understand their willingness to die to kill us.
The room grows quiet as I suggest Billy Goats Gruff provides a safe place to take the risk to talk about not only things that matter but also things we feel we can’t talk about.
Taken with kind permission of the authors from their book Slow Wonder: Letters on imagination and education by Peter O’Connor and Claudia Rozas Gómez (Cambridge University Press). In a series of letters to each other the authors imagine alternatives to current orthodoxies in New Zealand education.
